Two weeks ago, I was down because I don’t help Maria shovel snow as I always have in a giant snowstorm that had her shoveling for days.

I did what I could with my restored heart, but I couldn’t escape the reality of it. Maria kept telling me to stop, and my doctor’s advice echoed in my head: “do what you feel like doing, and no more.”

This was a moment of choice, I knew: I could either live a good long while and take care of myself, or I could drop dead suddenly one day because I didn’t take care of myself.

It happens all the time. I chose life. Still, it was hard.

Not only could I shovel as much snow as was needed, but I also fell on the ice twice and narrowly escaped some broken bones.

This was disheartening to me, I felt as if I was losing ground, and needed to see myself in a different way, as older people often have to do. Breaking a bone at 73 is not like breaking a bone at 18, the last time I did it.

My solution is not to fuss about my health and prescriptions, or to batter myself with old talk – “at our age,” etc. The thing about aging is you don’t want to surrender to it, but you can’t responsibly ignore it. You just have to see yourself as a vintage car – it can run forever, but it needs a lot of maintenance.

What is aging about, if not the truth, and I was losing my grip on what the truth was for me now, in the midst of this tough storm.

In my original family, you either defended yourself and fought on or perished. We were living “Survivors” long before TV discovered it. We didn’t and don’t quit.

So I did battle back. I found a great pair of ice gripping pull-on winter boots and ordered them, and I went online and found a highly-rated and inexpensive battery-powered snowblower.

Both came quickly, and just in time for the next snow.

Yesterday and this morning, I had a chance to use both. A smaller storm (four inches when it came yesterday) and there was a lot of ice everywhere. I put on my new boots, loaded up my blower with two ion batteries, and headed out into the storm.

Maria went to feed the animals and I made a wide and clean path. It was a major contribution, and my heart was happy with it.

Maria smiled, we both knew I didn’t really need to use my snowblower, but I was eager to use it, and I loved using it.

I was as proud as a football champion. And Zinnia loved to chase the snow blowing out into the air and try to grab it. We both had fun together.

I love my path. Sometimes little things can be big things. By today, the snow had melted, and the path was back to grass. It was my path in a snowstorm.

My shoes gripped the ice firmly and I could walk in confidence and feel helpful and engaged with the life of the farm. Farm’s are tough places, there are so many chores, and if I can’t do what I always did, I can do a lot.

One spiritual writer, I appreciate calls this “Withering Into The Truth.” This is a gentler way of seeing growing old more positively and not just in terms of loss and diminishment.

William Butler Yeats referred to “the lying days of our youth.” Oliver Wendell Holmes described getting older as finding “the simplicity that lies on the other side of complexity.”

Thomas Merton never admitted to being old, only to “growing older,” which I think is the right way to describe it. We are all always “growing older,” but I do not see myself as old, and I doubt I ever will.

I see growing older as simpler than being young. The world expects so much less of you, anything you offer seems exciting. My writing loves getting older and wiser.

I’ve always thought of getting older as a license, to tell the truth. Sometimes, it feels – during the big storm – that that’s all that is left. I just want to tell the story in love, not resignation.

I am in my seventies now – I never thought I’d get here – and I find that it is liberating beyond words to be at a point in life where I no longer need to argue, posture, apologize, beg,  pretend or yearn. I have nothing to prove that is not already proven or that cannot any longer be proven.

In other words, I am free at last.

One thing always remains the same for me, and politicians and the news cannot take it away from me:

All around me is the glory of this astonishing thing called life.